The Changing Sales Paradigm
The next Techmakers event will be a special one! I’m always thankful for the opportunity to speak and Techmakers provides an audience that’s different. Techmakers are largely technology professionals who bridge the gap between the back-end and the front-end folks. There’s also a nice mix of small and large businesses in attendance at these events.
The next event will be at Scotty’s Brewhouse downtown on Tuesday, January 5th at 5:30PM. I hope you can be in attendance! We’ve actually grown to a point where we’re now taking up both privacy rooms at Scotty’s!
I’ll be speaking on the changing sales paradigm. Salespeople who have not adopted technology are taking quite a back seat to those who have and the gap is growing. Traditional outbound sales departments with no online presence are putting their business at quite a disadvantage.
At issue is consumers and businesses now have incredible tools and networks available to them online to help educate them on purchasing and business decisions. There are focused networks and communities online, search engine keywords, and blogs that provide consumers and businesses with a ton of information before they ever call or speak to your sales representatives.
By the time a prospect arrives at your site, on the phone, or at your doorstep, they are sometimes more knowledgeable of your products, services, strengths, weaknesses, and business as a whole than you’d like them to be.
In the past, your salesperson was the conduit between the prospect and the sale. This is no longer true. Now information that’s openly available online is the conduit. As a result, if your company wants to be present when people are at the critical step in the decision-making process, sales people must be online where those decisions are happening.
Dialing for dollars is no longer the only means of growing sales. I’m not against outbound calling, but if you want improved results for your sales expenditures, you need to balance outbound calls with online and offline networking activities. A balance of all these actions will provide your company with increased exposure, authority… and ultimately, trust. Long-term, you’ll have a much healthier sales pipeline.
Best of all, these methodologies can be accurately measured. We can measure traffic and conversions from review sites, online directories, referring sites and blogs, social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as social mediums such as Twitter. These strategies require momentum as well… investing a few weeks in an online strategy won’t help your company – but investing a year has the potential of growing your business faster than you’d imagine.
I hope to see you at the event to further discuss the strategies and tools your business can adopt to begin building out these new sales strategies.
and wise. It’s time to kick it up a notch and I’m going big.
